Consider this fair warning to any teacher at Portland High School who might break the ice this week by asking students, "How did you spend your summer?"

Tate Gale has a story to tell.

While most of his peers were busy squeezing all the fun they could out of their soggy vacation, Tate spent four long weeks in a classroom crammed with 90-plus kids his own age.

The classroom was in northern Uganda.

Tate was the teacher.

The kids called him "sir."

Tate is 14.

"I loved it," he said with a disarming smile Thursday morning, his first day of high school. "It was really satisfying for me."

It all started last winter, when Tate's parents, Jon and Nori Gale, got a call from Dana Stinson, a classmate from Colby College who works for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Gulu, Uganda.

Stinson's brainstorm: Send Tate over for the summer to work as a volunteer.

Uganda? A country that just a few years ago was battling the insurgent Lord's Resistance Army in the very region Stinson was stationed?

A 14-year-old boy who'd never flown anywhere alone, let alone to Africa?

"I had to put all of that in a box," Nori Gale admitted this week. "I really did."

But after Stinson assured the Gales that the region is now stable and that she'd keep a close eye on their son, Nori said, "we decided there's no way we're not going to let him go."

So, on July 6, off Tate went. Stinson met him in Uganda's capital, Kampala, which they left the next morning for the six-hour trip over "the worst roads you've ever seen" to Gulu, near the Sudanese border.

Along the way, Tate stared wide-eyed at the African landscape, at the baboons feasting on mounds of garbage, at the first of many men he would see walking along roadsides with machine guns

"It was crazy," he said. "I thought, 'Oh my God, what am I doing here?'"

Good question.

The morning after they arrived in Gulu – Tate stayed in Stinson's guest room in a home owned by the U.S. Agency for International Development – Stinson brought her young charge to the town's primary school and introduced him to the principal.

Come back on Monday at 7:30 a.m., the principal told him.

"Walking up to the school, I didn't really know what I was going to be doing. Cleaning bathrooms? Who knows?" Tate recalled.

Stinson had told him that maybe, by the end of his five-week stay, he might teach a class or two.

"But that's not really how it worked out," Tate said.

He'd no sooner arrived at the school that Monday when a senior teacher sized him up – Tate is tall for his age – and asked, "So, do you want to teach English or science?"

Say what?

Swallowing his panic, Tate replied, "Well, probably English – because I know it better."

"I was scared out of my mind," he said. "Then they sat me down with another English teacher who kind of showed me the ropes."

So much for his formal training. Two hours later, armed with only a textbook, his poise and his good looks, Tate was escorted to a classroom where it quickly became clear to him that not one of the 90 or so pupils – all between the ages of 13 and 15 – had ever laid eyes on a white teacher.

What's more, he said, "I didn't know anything about teaching other than sitting in a classroom myself. The first class was a nightmare for sure."

But he forged ahead – and it got better each day. (After he heard one student softly saying, "Repeat, sir, repeat," Tate realized he was talking too fast and, much to the class' relief, shifted into a lower gear.)

And get this. Not one of the kids, all of whom assumed he was at least in college and training to be a teacher, gave him an ounce of guff.

"The mode of discipline there is caning – they use it on these kids from when they're very...